Today is the day the internet feared.
Maybe it wasn’t an active fear, not a doomsday everyone knew was coming, but still one that almost seemed inevitable: The magic of Reddit is gone. As of today, June 30, 2023, several mobile apps for browsing the platform are closing up shop ahead of a new initiative from Reddit to charge for access to its API. It’s the culmination of weeks of revolt from users and mods upset that the move will price out the third-party developers responsible for the apps that help make the community what it is. Even if the decision is ultimately rolled back, it’s a moment that has shifted the culture of Reddit forever. And shifted the internet with it.
If all of this sounds like a lot of fretting over something as wonky as an API change, it’s not. It’s indicative of a growing new awareness of what constitutes labor on the internet, and how communities can have their work mined for money-making ventures. Specifically, ones powered by artificial intelligence.
When the company announced the API change in April, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told The New York Times one of the main reasons for the move was that it would compel companies using Reddit’s archives for AI training to pay up. “The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Huffman said. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”
But charging for the API doesn’t affect just companies like OpenAI, Google, and others that are using Reddit discussions to train artificial intelligence systems. After the company announced the change, popular Reddit apps like Apollo and Reddit Is Fun announced that they’d shutter rather than pay the fees, which Apollo developer Christian Selig estimated would cost some $20 million annually.
To protest Reddit’s decision, mods of nearly 9,000 subreddits switched the groups to private earlier this month, depleting the vibrancy of conversation on the site, and even impacting Google search results. Hoffman said in a leaked memo to employees that the dustup would “pass,” but as Rory Mir, associate director of community organizing at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told my colleague Boone Ashworth, it’s the kind of thing that can wreck a platform. “Like with Twitter, it’s not a big collapse when a social media website starts to die, but it is a slow attrition unless they change their course,” Mir said.
The Monitor is a weekly column devoted to everything happening in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, TV to Twitter.
And, like with Twitter, it’s the kind of shake-up that makes users realize the value they give to tech companies—for free—even if they just mean to give it to the community. A poster on one subreddit dedicated to saving the third-party apps broke it down succinctly: “Never forget how Reddit began as an empty website, which its founders populated with hundreds of fake accounts to give the illusion of activity and popularity—Remember that without us, the users, Reddit would be nothing but [Hoffman’s] digital dollhouse.” (Disclosure: WIRED is a publication of Condé Nast. Advance Publications, Condé Nast’s parent company, holds an ownership stake in Reddit.)
If all of this is starting to sound like a labor movement, that’s because it is. AI’s rise has caused a revaluation of what people put on the internet. Artists who feel their work was scraped by AI without credit or compensation are seeking recourse. Fan fiction writers who shared their work freely to entertain fellow fans now find their niche sex tropes on AI-assisted writing tools. Hollywood screenwriters are currently on strike to make sure AI systems aren’t enlisted to do their work for them. No, TV and film writers don’t write for the internet, but so much of what they create ends up online anyway, ready to be plucked.
If this truly is the end of Reddit as the world has known it, that would be tragic. Reddit, for all of its flaws, is still one of the last true communities on the internet. Its mods are volunteers, its users just generally enjoy the things they’re there to read and post about. It’s easy to see why watching their content get turned into a commodity might cause what Intelligencer called an “existential dilemma.” Online life has always been a hustle (it’s me, hi), but for those who didn’t necessarily want to be influencers, it’s also been a labor of love. What this recent disruption has shown, if anything, is that they were destined to be cogs too. Even if that’s not what any of them signed up for.
